I just finished the first week of my six week summer course, dear readers, and let me tell you, I am living the dream of teaching without consequences. That's right - no consequences. So what if my course evaluations are terrible...my career doesn't currently depend on them. So what if I say something that makes them uncomfortable. So what if they complain to the department chair. So what if they all suspect that I'm a lesbo commie. I mean, really, what can my department do? Fire me? I've already given up my stipend. My health insurance is set to expire in about three weeks. I've even finalized a clean break on my lease. In five weeks, I'm walking out of the last class session onto a plane to Baltimore. I'm a free woman, Big Bad University! You got nothing on me!
I'm pretty sure this is what tenure feels like. Except probably with more meetings.
Fearless Teaching. That's what I'm calling it - that is what teaching without consequences enables me to do. If I were to write a handbook to a brave pedagogy such as this, I would outline the following necessary components:
1) No pressure. This might be the last class I'll ever teach, and instead of feeling the overwhelming pressure of wanting to make it the best class ever, I only feel a huge release of pressure to give a crap about all the obstacles that get in the way of actual learning. I am not governed by the looming bureaucratic expectations for what I ought to do, and instead just do what I want to do. This means a release of control - I feel less of a need to 'control' my students, or 'control' how they perceive me and my course, or 'control' how rigid my policies are. For example, I just took in a student one week late - sure, she missed one-sixth of the whole class (and probably the most important sixth, as we laid the groundwork for the next month). But a little exposure to radical theories is better than no exposure radical theories. Such an approach takes a lot of the internal pressure I put on myself for things to be perfect - liberation is messy, as they say, so when I allow for my teaching to focus on liberation, I allow for myself (and others, and life in general) to be imperfect, too.
2) Shift from testing to engagement and application. For an educator, it's ironic that I greatly dislike most of what are considered to be necessary course components. Like tests. Or quizzes. Or grades, for that matter. So I cut them out. Now, I still grade things, but I've set up the class so that everyone can get an A. Unfortunately, I have to have some accountability measures or else they won't do the readings, but a large part of their grade is made up of activities where they apply what we're learning in their everyday lives. Is this harder to grade? Probably - there are fewer 'right' answers in applied learning, and mostly I just grade them based on the degree of effort and reflection they put into the activity. But they are DOING things, and that is beautiful. They have to think beyond multiple choice answers, and the class experience is carried over into their everyday lives. My goal is not for them to understand everything or memorize it or be able to parrot it back to me, but to engage it, to apply it, to immerse themselves in a critical, liberatory framework. You can't grade that, and, frankly, I'm not really trying to.
3) Tell it like it is. This is probably the best part of Fearless Teaching. In the past, even during my class last summer, I tried very hard to be a Good Instructor, to be Fair and Balanced, to be Open-Minded. I would ask things like, "Why might this be considered oppressive?" or, "Do you think the birdcage theory reflects women's experiences?" But trying to toe the line didn't spare me course evaluations that wrote me off as "biased" simply because I was a woman teaching the sociology of gender. So now, I don't try to be Fair and Balanced. I was called biased even when I was trying very hard not to be; now, I am completely unapologetic about my agenda. Now I ask, "Why is this oppressive?" or "How does the birdcage define the lives of other groups at the bottom of hierarchies?" I don't ask, "do you think the model minority stereotype is true?" I say, "It's a myth, and it's a myth because of these three reasons." I am more forceful, certain, unambiguous. I don't offer room for interpretation. I provide no space for capitalism, patriarchy, sexism, or heterosexism. Instead I'm just embracing the flame-spitting prophetic Voice of Truth.
In that respect, this is one aspect that makes my Fearless Teaching not so grassrootsy radical. It's lecture-heavy, and I don't allow much room for exploration. I don't really lead them along into some of the main ideas, letting them work their way through the murky waters, slowly unpacking their privilege, slowly decolonizing their viewpoints. There is some exploration, but mostly I just tell them. There just isn't enough time. They aren't here to come exploring with me - they didn't sign up for a six week workshop on self-decolonization. They are here because it counts toward their major, or they need a general education credit, or they failed out of another major and need to finish a sociology major in six months. They have no idea what ride they signed up for, and if there is a ride, most of them would rather not go on it, thank you very much. So I am rolling with their interpretation that this class is like other classes, and not really an extended radical workshop thinly veiled by seemingly legitimate class things like a syllabus and a Blackboard account.
The way I see it, I got six weeks, and I will tell them as much as I can in that six weeks. A few of them are hungry for these theories now - I can see them make connections and their minds expand as they realize how to reinterpret their own experiences of marginalization or privilege. A few others think I'm a lesbo commie, and they are wishing they signed up for something less infuriating, like introduction to theory. But for now, most of them are pleasantly noncommittal - they stare at me with an indifferent smile on their faces and take down notes as they see fit. They still see it as a regular class.
Soon, they may come to realize its not. Or it might take a year, or three years, or seven. Or never. But I will finish this class knowing that at least I didn't hold back.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Negotiating gender in the hair salon
As a short-haired woman, I have come to see hair cuts as a ceaseless negotiation. They probably wouldn't be if I found a stylist and stuck with it, but as I am incredibly cheap (more to come on this front in a future post), I'd rather just pop into a Hair Cuttery or Fantastic Sam's or my mall's Unisex Hair Salon (that's its real name!) for a $18 trim. As these locales are revolving doors for sylists, every trim is with a new face. There is much to be said for having a perfect stranger cut your hair every six weeks - they always make small changes or have slightly divergent techniques. Some prefer using razors, some prefer scissor-over-comb, some like thinning shears and others clearly don't own a pair. If you aren't too attached to having your hair just one way, it can be nice to have it a little different every time.
But having to explain what it is I want in a cut every time I visit does have its obvious downsides. I have regaled you all, dear readers, with a post mentioning my short hair as a gender challenge before. As I identify as a woman and generally go through the world read and treated as a woman, sometimes I forget that short hair on a woman can still pose a challenge to gendered expectations. I am made the most aware of this challenge when I get my hair cut and for a few days afterwards, when it's shortest. It could be that I feel more exposed, or it could be that people really are looking at me differently - it's hard to say, as my sense of sudden baldness may tinge my perspective.
The most overt comments on what my short hair means for my gender presentation (which, in all respects, is almost completely gender conforming) have come from the stylists themselves. Seeing as how I meet a new one every month or so, I have a steady stream of opportunities to negotiate what I want versus what they are comfortable giving me.
Last fall I paid a visit to my Unisex Hair Salon and I was assigned to a middle-aged Asian woman. I was about to ask for my usual ("I'll take a three in the back, cut out around the ears, keep it a little longer on the sides and the front, and thin it out if you can too, please!"), but before I even sat down she put her hand on my shoulder and said, "You look like a boy!" Gotta love her for coming right out with it. "You are a woman, but you look like a boy. I can help you look more like a woman."
"But I like it this way..." I mustered feebly. It's difficult to stand up to woman for whom tact is not really an issue.
"But you look like a boy!"
"I know but that's okay. I prefer it short."
She stared at me dubiously, and then proceeded to trim my hair a tiiiiiiny bit. Then she whipped out the thinning shears and thinned it a tiiiiiiiny bit. "Okay!" she announced.
"Um...can you cut a little more?"
She thinned it a tiiiiiiny bit more. "Okay!" she said again, and this time moved to take my cape off. Clearly she had cut as much as she was going to cut.
For months I went to the Unisex Hair Salon in fear of being saddled with her again (there is no non-racist way to say, "I'd like a haircut, please...but, uh, give me anyone but the Asian lady"). Last April I was assigned to her chair once more. I braced myself for a pointless thinning, and I made up my mind to demand that she cut more if she tried to pull the cape off me again, but she actually cut my hair very thoroughly. It may have something to do with the fact that the woman both before and after me were middle-aged white women with that short, middle-aged white women hair, so I fit right in. She must have cut enough heads of hair like my own mother's to feel like it didn't matter much when she cut mine.
Last weekend, when I was in D.C., I dropped by the Dupont Circle Hair Cuttery, which has always been a dependable place to get my do cropped. Historically, they haven't been so afraid of cutting too close. It may be that it is in a trendy metropolitan area, or it could be because, as my partner tells me, all the gay boys get their hair cut there, so the stylists are accustomed to such things. Who knows.
But last week (with another Asian stylist, strangely enough), gender came up again in an overt way. She asked me whether I wanted the neckline trimmed straight across with the buzzer, or if I'd rather she blend it in. I told her she could do whatever she preferred - I don't see the neckline, so as long as I can tell it's not a mullet, I'm none the wiser to the specifics.
She stood quietly for a moment, running her fingers through the freshly trimmed locks at the crown of my head. "Well, straight across is...is more like a man. That's a man's cut. Blended is for a woman. So I will blend it."
And then she spend maybe six or seven minutes meticulously manicuring a "blended" hairline, digging different buzzers into my neck to achieve the appropriate womanly effect. My main thought while she was doing this: "dang, if I were a man I'd so have been out of here five minutes ago!"
It's interesting to me that hair can be so definitively gendered, to the point where a neckline is denoted as masculine or feminine. It's sort of like the Butch Bakery, that cupcake place opened by a dude who wanted to make cupcakes "for men." (Although with a name like Butch Bakery, he's not just going to be getting men looking for cupcakes.) They are CUPCAKES. Literally pieces of baked sugar and flour and butter with some icing on top. They don't have a gender! And neither do neckline techniques, or hair itself. Hair is as dead and chromosome-less as cupcakes. But as gender is a defining social organizing principal, we seem to only be able to understand inanimate things by imbuing them with gendered meaning. Very often these meanings seem to keep us safely within our assigned boxes, even if we have tried to take a step out of them. If women have short hair, they should at least have a feminine neckline; if men eat cupcakes, they better be whiskey flavored and covered in camo.
We are ridiculous. All of the energy and creativity and human brilliance squandered on such meaningless details as how to make our choices more like a woman's or more like a man's, so that we don't really have to change much of anything at all!
Now I really need a cupcake.
But having to explain what it is I want in a cut every time I visit does have its obvious downsides. I have regaled you all, dear readers, with a post mentioning my short hair as a gender challenge before. As I identify as a woman and generally go through the world read and treated as a woman, sometimes I forget that short hair on a woman can still pose a challenge to gendered expectations. I am made the most aware of this challenge when I get my hair cut and for a few days afterwards, when it's shortest. It could be that I feel more exposed, or it could be that people really are looking at me differently - it's hard to say, as my sense of sudden baldness may tinge my perspective.
The most overt comments on what my short hair means for my gender presentation (which, in all respects, is almost completely gender conforming) have come from the stylists themselves. Seeing as how I meet a new one every month or so, I have a steady stream of opportunities to negotiate what I want versus what they are comfortable giving me.
Last fall I paid a visit to my Unisex Hair Salon and I was assigned to a middle-aged Asian woman. I was about to ask for my usual ("I'll take a three in the back, cut out around the ears, keep it a little longer on the sides and the front, and thin it out if you can too, please!"), but before I even sat down she put her hand on my shoulder and said, "You look like a boy!" Gotta love her for coming right out with it. "You are a woman, but you look like a boy. I can help you look more like a woman."
"But I like it this way..." I mustered feebly. It's difficult to stand up to woman for whom tact is not really an issue.
"But you look like a boy!"
"I know but that's okay. I prefer it short."
She stared at me dubiously, and then proceeded to trim my hair a tiiiiiiny bit. Then she whipped out the thinning shears and thinned it a tiiiiiiiny bit. "Okay!" she announced.
"Um...can you cut a little more?"
She thinned it a tiiiiiiny bit more. "Okay!" she said again, and this time moved to take my cape off. Clearly she had cut as much as she was going to cut.
For months I went to the Unisex Hair Salon in fear of being saddled with her again (there is no non-racist way to say, "I'd like a haircut, please...but, uh, give me anyone but the Asian lady"). Last April I was assigned to her chair once more. I braced myself for a pointless thinning, and I made up my mind to demand that she cut more if she tried to pull the cape off me again, but she actually cut my hair very thoroughly. It may have something to do with the fact that the woman both before and after me were middle-aged white women with that short, middle-aged white women hair, so I fit right in. She must have cut enough heads of hair like my own mother's to feel like it didn't matter much when she cut mine.
Last weekend, when I was in D.C., I dropped by the Dupont Circle Hair Cuttery, which has always been a dependable place to get my do cropped. Historically, they haven't been so afraid of cutting too close. It may be that it is in a trendy metropolitan area, or it could be because, as my partner tells me, all the gay boys get their hair cut there, so the stylists are accustomed to such things. Who knows.
But last week (with another Asian stylist, strangely enough), gender came up again in an overt way. She asked me whether I wanted the neckline trimmed straight across with the buzzer, or if I'd rather she blend it in. I told her she could do whatever she preferred - I don't see the neckline, so as long as I can tell it's not a mullet, I'm none the wiser to the specifics.
She stood quietly for a moment, running her fingers through the freshly trimmed locks at the crown of my head. "Well, straight across is...is more like a man. That's a man's cut. Blended is for a woman. So I will blend it."
And then she spend maybe six or seven minutes meticulously manicuring a "blended" hairline, digging different buzzers into my neck to achieve the appropriate womanly effect. My main thought while she was doing this: "dang, if I were a man I'd so have been out of here five minutes ago!"
It's interesting to me that hair can be so definitively gendered, to the point where a neckline is denoted as masculine or feminine. It's sort of like the Butch Bakery, that cupcake place opened by a dude who wanted to make cupcakes "for men." (Although with a name like Butch Bakery, he's not just going to be getting men looking for cupcakes.) They are CUPCAKES. Literally pieces of baked sugar and flour and butter with some icing on top. They don't have a gender! And neither do neckline techniques, or hair itself. Hair is as dead and chromosome-less as cupcakes. But as gender is a defining social organizing principal, we seem to only be able to understand inanimate things by imbuing them with gendered meaning. Very often these meanings seem to keep us safely within our assigned boxes, even if we have tried to take a step out of them. If women have short hair, they should at least have a feminine neckline; if men eat cupcakes, they better be whiskey flavored and covered in camo.
We are ridiculous. All of the energy and creativity and human brilliance squandered on such meaningless details as how to make our choices more like a woman's or more like a man's, so that we don't really have to change much of anything at all!
Now I really need a cupcake.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Why Ms. in my classroom makes me uncomfortable
Ms. magazine is in my classroom. And not just in a "Hey, let's read this article published in Ms. and have a class discussion about it!" but as in "You are required to enroll in Ms.' digital classroom as part of this class...and that'll be $15, btw." And I feel kinda like...well, like I just drank one too many syllabus + business strategy + liberal feminism cocktails.
Don't get me wrong - there is a special place in my feminist heart for Ms. It's like the Auntie who pushed to close the gender pay gap and advocated for shared heterosexual household labor and encouraged a bunch of her women friends to get into politics, because that's totally what Ms. did. So maybe she's a liiiiitle single issue sometimes, and maybe she keeps posting front covers that are kiiiiinda unfortunate (Obama as Superman? Pepto-pink backgrounds? And why is Alice Walker staring up at Gloria Steinem? Second editorship doesn't necessitate the punishment of having to eternally gaze at Steinem's grill.), and her feminism can be a biiiiiit culturally imperialist at times, but you know that you can down a couple of margaritas with her, have a serious chat, and then dance it out. You'll still disagree, but she's your Auntie and you can't help but love her, even when you are pretty sure she's wrong. Besides - she made it possible for you to rock your feminism now. How can you not adore her?
So my queasiness is not specifically about Ms. itself, but more about the limitations of our market politics and what sort of choices Ms. has had to make to expand their readership and keep making the monies. Specifically, I'm talking about their Digital Classroom.
(Let's put aside the fact that the whole point and beauty of classrooms is that they are not digital or made out of fancy computer pixel dust, but real, filled with real people, all captured in live, up-to-the minute, honest-to-goodness three-dimensional action. Ahem. But I digress.)
First, on the sign-up page for the digital classroom access, it explains how educators get a free subscription for enrolling their class. And students have to pay $15. Clearly that doesn't make sense because, from my general observations, professors actually have salaries, while graduate and undergraduate students don't, but then, statistically speaking, students far outnumber professors per classroom. I know I shouldn't knock them for a business decision, and I shouldn't snipe at $15 when most textbooks are a racket industry anyway, but it makes me sad thinking how Ms. seriously thought, "Hey, let's entice a bunch of professors to sign up by making it free, but then we'll charge the students so we can turn a tidy profit." Not only does this look bad for Ms., but it also makes me uncomfortable that professors are down with this. Would I, as en educator, ever agree to sign up for something that is free to me but will require a fee from each of my students (with the obligatory exception of free Ben & Jerry's, should Ben & Jerry ever create a digital classroom, and, if so, please God let me live to see it)? Perhaps I'm too close to the student role to answer this with certainty, but I'd like to think I'd at least sleep on it.
It's not the $15 that bothers me as much as the mandate that I join. Now, I agree we should support feminist work. And we should support Ms. magazine in an era where Playboy has a circulation that is 15 times greater. A world where more people by Playboy than Ms. is sad, and a world without Ms. would be even sadder. But does our world need Ms. to be a required classroom text? Every other feminist endeavor requires reflection...but Ms. doesn't appear to invite critical reflection in joining their Digital Classroom. They just want professors to sign up, and a lot of them, so that even more students students will have to join, too. What if there is no conversation about what Ms. in our classroom means to us?
Or, for that matter, what it means to study Ms., to even be tested on it? The online classroom isn't just access to articles and back issues, but it really does see itself as an academic text, one that is explicitly testable. The educator account includes access to sample quiz questions and writing assignment ideas. Ms. as a teaching supplement, perhaps. But as an academic authority? I thought magazines were supposed to be informative, or, at times, entertainment...not a series of facts and names to remember like some history text book. It is the real-world concepts that Ms. exposes us to that are its most important contributions, and these can't be easily tested in multiple choice format. And while I fiercely advocate breaking the academic/non-academic divide in our syllabi and classroom content, the Ms. digital classroom wasn't exactly what I had in mind. (It's not really 'non-academic' if only college-educated white women read it...right?).
Maybe one day I'll work for Ms. Or be published in Ms. Or take money from the Feminist Majority Foundation. And if that day comes, I will eat crow.
But at least I will have asked the hard questions. You know, like a feminist would.
Don't get me wrong - there is a special place in my feminist heart for Ms. It's like the Auntie who pushed to close the gender pay gap and advocated for shared heterosexual household labor and encouraged a bunch of her women friends to get into politics, because that's totally what Ms. did. So maybe she's a liiiiitle single issue sometimes, and maybe she keeps posting front covers that are kiiiiinda unfortunate (Obama as Superman? Pepto-pink backgrounds? And why is Alice Walker staring up at Gloria Steinem? Second editorship doesn't necessitate the punishment of having to eternally gaze at Steinem's grill.), and her feminism can be a biiiiiit culturally imperialist at times, but you know that you can down a couple of margaritas with her, have a serious chat, and then dance it out. You'll still disagree, but she's your Auntie and you can't help but love her, even when you are pretty sure she's wrong. Besides - she made it possible for you to rock your feminism now. How can you not adore her?
So my queasiness is not specifically about Ms. itself, but more about the limitations of our market politics and what sort of choices Ms. has had to make to expand their readership and keep making the monies. Specifically, I'm talking about their Digital Classroom.
(Let's put aside the fact that the whole point and beauty of classrooms is that they are not digital or made out of fancy computer pixel dust, but real, filled with real people, all captured in live, up-to-the minute, honest-to-goodness three-dimensional action. Ahem. But I digress.)
First, on the sign-up page for the digital classroom access, it explains how educators get a free subscription for enrolling their class. And students have to pay $15. Clearly that doesn't make sense because, from my general observations, professors actually have salaries, while graduate and undergraduate students don't, but then, statistically speaking, students far outnumber professors per classroom. I know I shouldn't knock them for a business decision, and I shouldn't snipe at $15 when most textbooks are a racket industry anyway, but it makes me sad thinking how Ms. seriously thought, "Hey, let's entice a bunch of professors to sign up by making it free, but then we'll charge the students so we can turn a tidy profit." Not only does this look bad for Ms., but it also makes me uncomfortable that professors are down with this. Would I, as en educator, ever agree to sign up for something that is free to me but will require a fee from each of my students (with the obligatory exception of free Ben & Jerry's, should Ben & Jerry ever create a digital classroom, and, if so, please God let me live to see it)? Perhaps I'm too close to the student role to answer this with certainty, but I'd like to think I'd at least sleep on it.
It's not the $15 that bothers me as much as the mandate that I join. Now, I agree we should support feminist work. And we should support Ms. magazine in an era where Playboy has a circulation that is 15 times greater. A world where more people by Playboy than Ms. is sad, and a world without Ms. would be even sadder. But does our world need Ms. to be a required classroom text? Every other feminist endeavor requires reflection...but Ms. doesn't appear to invite critical reflection in joining their Digital Classroom. They just want professors to sign up, and a lot of them, so that even more students students will have to join, too. What if there is no conversation about what Ms. in our classroom means to us?
Or, for that matter, what it means to study Ms., to even be tested on it? The online classroom isn't just access to articles and back issues, but it really does see itself as an academic text, one that is explicitly testable. The educator account includes access to sample quiz questions and writing assignment ideas. Ms. as a teaching supplement, perhaps. But as an academic authority? I thought magazines were supposed to be informative, or, at times, entertainment...not a series of facts and names to remember like some history text book. It is the real-world concepts that Ms. exposes us to that are its most important contributions, and these can't be easily tested in multiple choice format. And while I fiercely advocate breaking the academic/non-academic divide in our syllabi and classroom content, the Ms. digital classroom wasn't exactly what I had in mind. (It's not really 'non-academic' if only college-educated white women read it...right?).
Maybe one day I'll work for Ms. Or be published in Ms. Or take money from the Feminist Majority Foundation. And if that day comes, I will eat crow.
But at least I will have asked the hard questions. You know, like a feminist would.
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